N
ow published in the UK, following last year’s American edition courtesy of
McSweeney’s, Multiples: 12 stories in 18 languages by 61 authors
is a paradox: it is full of copies that are also originals. The volume’s
editor, Adam Thirlwell, presents himself, in a thoroughly Thirlwellian
introduction (“You, dear reader, can therefore decide how you think the
biscotti should crumble”), as an “impresario” overseeing a “giant exercise
in cajoling . . . international novelists to work”. The task he sets them is
to translate a story – only the story, unless the translator happens to be
the first in line, will itself be a translation, and, if the translator is
at the back of the queue, will likely be a translation of a translation of a
translation.

Multiples contains just twelve “original” stories, but it presents
those stories “in 18 languages by 61 authors”. A sequence of translations
runs its course; another, with a new point of origin and new set of
translators, then sets off. They see only the story immediately preceding
their own in the sequence, and few are professional translators. Their notes
say as much. “Traduttore, traditore”, Frédéric Beigbeder
shrugs: “Please forgive me”. Julie Orringer acknowledges her reliance on her
Hungarian editor and the internet. Laurent Binet proclaims his love of
speaking English. Chloe Hooper boasts of “schoolgirl French, but that of a
very dumb schoolgirl”. Illustrators play along, too, to more arbitrary
(because wordless) effect. With a single exception, each sequence alternates
English with another (living) language.

“Literature is one of those strange arts where the original is often
experienced as a multiple”, Thirwell observes in his opening address.
Novelists attempt to write something “as singular as possible”, aspiring to
uniqueness – but does this uniqueness lie beyond the reach of translation?
The “general bookstore mode”, we are told, in a shunting of the blame down
the supply chain, “is to treat translations as so many transparencies, so
many invisibilities”. Why the embarrassment? Rather than pretend it didn’t
exist, would it not be better to find out if a novel’s style was indeed
“entirely transportable”, as Thirlwell initially proposes?

How to test this hypothesis? Well, why not have, say, John Wray put “Das Tier
in der Synagoge” by Kafka into English (the German original is not
included), then Etgar Keret put Wray’s “In Our Synagogue” into Hebrew? These
non-identical twins stand on facing pages, making it relatively easy to
compare them line by line – if you can read Hebrew. If you can’t, move on to
Nathan Englander’s re-Englishing of the story as “The Creature in Our Shul”
and its partner, “Los Murmullos” by Alejandro Zambra. Most of the original
stories in Multiples undergo six transformations, but this one ends
on the fifth, “The Animal of the Church”, translated from Zambra’s Spanish
by Dave Eggers, that stands alone.

Such a sequence might threaten to work as does, for example, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises
in Style, or a set of musical variations on a theme, in which a basic
narrative armature or a consistent, underlying harmonic progression supports
a series of integumentary novelties. Only here the net effect, if you don’t
find it too fiddly to flip backwards and forwards between Eggers and Wray,
goes deeper, as the structure of the story warps.

Wray has it that the creature is about the size of a weasel and of indefinite
colour. It is essentially “unthreatening”, but women may fear it; men are
indifferent. It is the “pet of the synagogue”. Prayers during a service
startle it into the open, where it slithers down the brass rod that supports
the curtain of the Ark of the Covenant, to stare not at the congregation but
“simply . . . toward those forces by which it feels itself to be at risk”.
This perennial disquiet is itself disquieting. The official line is that the
creature should be driven away and the synagogue re-consecrated. We are not
told why this turns out to be impossible.

In Eggers’s hands, the synagogue is a church, and the creature’s preferred
spot a confessional (with Eggers oddly using the word “confessor” to mean
both priest and parishioner). It is still weasel-size but has acquired a
“blue-back” coat of fur, and provokes female shrieks and male “barks of
disapproval”. Multiple translations have promoted it from pet to “lord of
the vermin”. It can behave nonchalantly, and the clergy, rather than being
indifferent, have grown “used” to its “nightmarish” face. Ultimately,
however, the disquiet persists, as in the narrator’s own conclusive visit to
the confessional booth:

“It regarded me with the casual curiosity of a child waking up in the late
evening to find his parents entertaining a friend . . . [and] slithered
under the wall to visit, I presumed, with the priest on the other side. It
returned moments later, as if it had received a message from my confessor
meant for me. That message, delivered by an animal like this, carried a
musty scent but was nonetheless clear. It said, Look away, look away, look
away.”

Thirlwell reflects “sadly” on the result of his experiment: “A gracious sense
of fidelity to the dead overlaps with an ungracious glee in infidelity”;
some originals emerge “unscathed”, while others are “gruesomely demolished”.
Changing “one key word” in otherwise “almost identical” versions could be
the making or undoing, depending on your perspective, of its successors.

Yet the pleasure of reading Multiples does not stand or fall on
following the experiment absolutely. Thirlwell affably invites readers to
“loop through” the book, or to “more sternly” follow each sequence, as they
wish. And it can be rewarding to plunge into the middle of a sequence with a
story such as “The Fox and the Earth God”, in which Jonathan Lethem and Mara
Faye Lethem wheel freely around a moral tale by the wonderful Japanese
Buddhist writer Kenji Miyazawa, then leaf back to Valeria Luiselli’s “El
dios terrestre y el zorro” and spot the phrase “El Zorro . . . nunca metía
la nariz donde no se le requería” – an idiomatic expansion of David
Mitchell’s straight, economic line about the fox, that he “rarely interfered
with anyone”. Perhaps the phrase is also there in Nadeem Aslam’s Urdu
adaptation.

As for reading sternly – or at least reading Kierkegaard six times over, as
far as some linguistic guesswork allows – this has a similar effect. The
first four iterations of “Skrift-Prøver” seem to strive for clarity and
fidelity. Clancy Martin’s “preface to a preface”, in which a young writer
butters up his public, becomes Cees Nooteboom’s “voorwoord bij een
voorwoord”; Kierkegaard’s author loses a few of his many initials, and gains
a surname; Jean-Christophe Valtat follows J. M. Coetzee closely, from the
“salles de billard” to the final comic gambit of offering “un tariff réduit
à salon de coiffure”. The fifth story in the sequence, “What I Would Like To
Say” by Sheila Heti, then cheerfully gives up on the word-for-word approach
for the sake of interjections such as “The public loooves
this!” and a cheekily literal misreading: “Now that I have your attention, I
must slip away for a moment to reprimand my soufflé”, for Valtat’s
“Maintenant que j’ai attiré votre attention, je peux reprendre mon souffle”.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri turns his subsequent floundering after Heti into the
story of “a translator who has been assigned a task, but who never manages
to get past the translation of the author’s name”.

Winter Journeys is of a similar size and collaborative structure to Multiples.
The authors are credited as Georges Perec and the Oulipo, the “Workshop for
Potential Literature”, founded in 1960 by Queneau and François Le Lionnais;
it opens with a typically sharp burst of ingenuity from Perec: Le Voyage
d’hiver, first published in 1979, three years before his death,
and here translated by John Sturrock.

You sometimes hear that writing is a solitary business. Thank goodness for
such shows of solidarity

Perec’s story looks back in turn to the end of summer forty years earlier,
when Vincent Degraël, a young teacher of literature, stumbles across a slim
volume called The Winter Journey by the mysterious Hugo Vernier.
Recognizing the book’s rarity, and the extent of Vernier’s quotation of
other French poets from the end of the nineteenth century, who happen to be
Degraël’s specialist subject, he reads on, discovering Rimbaud, Mallarmé,
Corbière and all, “jumbled together” in a “parading of influence”, a “mosaic
almost every piece of which was the work of someone else”. Then he checks
the date of publication: 1864. Vernier predates Rimbaud et al. They are the
copyists, Vernier the original. Naturally, the war intervenes and fate moves
to obscure the past once more.

Thirteen years later, Perec’s fellow Oulipians initiated a chain of sequels,
sometimes under apposite assumed names, tracing inventive courses around his
secret history of French literature. Jacques Roubaud came first with Yesterday’s
Journey (Le Voyage d’hier, with the “v”/vie
of Vernier subtracted). Roubaud’s game is to extend the conceit, to make it
fit history and the previously delineated “facts” of the matter. He brings
on Perec himself, to encounter somebody who knew Vernier slightly in
Brisbane, where they go on a search for kangaroos: “Perec claimed these
animals did not really exist but had been invented by naturalists and then
marketed by travel agents”. Roubaud also gives Vernier a wife and a
connection with Théophile Gautier.

And so on, from Perec and Roubaud to The Obscure Journey by Daniel
Levin Becker, written this year and “yet to appear in the Bibliothèque
oulipienne”. (In the group’s “research papers”, that is; the introduction
states that there is no equivalent collected edition in French, and that
this Atlas Press collection in English builds on their earlier limited
edition, of about half the size, published in 2001.) Further revelations
include the recovery of Vernier’s journal (in Various Journeys
– Voyages divers – by Étienne Lécroart) and Reine Haugure’s
account of Henry James’s story “The Figure in the Carpet” as an
“anticipatory plagiary of the Oulipo” in H . . . V . . .’s
Journey. In A Journey Amidst Glasses, Harry Mathews, the “token
cowboy” of the group, pulls the Jamesian carpet from under everyone’s feet
by reframing the Vernier story as a hoax (“Not the whole story. Just the
important parts”), only for Mikhaïl Gorliouk to revive it, by way of Italo
Calvino, in If on a Night a Winter’s Traveller (sic). By
the time it is Michèle Audin’s turn, in IV-R-16, Gautier
is still on the scene, as the name of a street, and the “hyper-novel” has
acquired a number of frustrating constraints. Others have ventured, après
Perec, to Key West or Marathon, and cherry-picked the most interesting
authors to draw into the conspiracy:

“Even two-bit provincial poets had now been called in. Of course, I’d have
loved to write something about Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch .
. . . But it had already been done . . . . The worst part of all was If
on a Winter’s Night. That book was mine, that was all there was to
it, Calvino had written it for me. I am the reader in If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveller. And they had now succeeded in introducing my book
into their stories.”

Like Multiples, Winter Journeys is enjoy­able for both the
self-echoing whole and the cunning individual performances. This is original
copying of a high order, seriously playful in its adoption of
pseudo-scholarly footnotes and typographical devices, its creative
repetitions and reinventions, and its conjuring of Vernier, a semi-invisible
proto-Oulipian writing potential literature a century before the group’s
foundation. You sometimes hear that writing is a solitary business. Thank
goodness for such shows of solidarity.

Michael Caines is an editor at the TLS. His book about
Shakespeare and the eighteenth century will be published later this year.